The Dog Stars, L’Inconnue, Decorado: what’s new at the cinema this week

What to see in theaters.

THE EVENT
THE DOG STARS ★★☆☆☆

By Ridley Scott

The essentials

A pilot, his dog and a world emptied by a pandemic. Scott returns to SF in an intimate rather than spectacular mode. Sublime at times, but overall a little short young man.

Ten years after a disaster, Hig (Jacob Elordi) survives on this old airfield with his dog and Bangley (Josh Brolin), a former soldier who shoots on sight. One day, aboard his old Cessna, he picks up a voice on the radio and decides to go see what it is… On screen, the result is strange, paradoxical even on the part of Sir Ridley Scott. It’s a bit lazy, and like Hig in his Cessna, we often border on boredom… But what’s at stake goes beyond the success of the film. Scott does not give in to the classic postapo, he moves the cursors: if the genre has been thriving since Mad Max to shortage and predation, the trigger here is a voice captured on the radio, a promise and not a threat. Its simplicity is so deliberate that it even has a name in the credits. Dariusz Wolski, who lit each of his films since Prometheusgives way to Erik Messerschmidt, operational director of Mank and of The Killer. Or the opposite of the Scott texture: no smoke, no monumental backlighting and a light that describes instead of sculpting.

Gaël Golhen

Read the full review

FIRST TO LIKE

THE UNKNOWN ★★★☆☆

By Arthur Harari

Five years after the shock of his Onoda, 10,000 nights in the jungledrama around a Japanese soldier kept away from the world on a Pacific island and three since the planetary triumph Anatomy of a fall by Justine Triet whose screenplay he co-wrote, Arthur Harari presents his new feature film as a filmmaker, The Unknown. Niels Schneider (David) wakes up in the body of Léa Seydoux (Eva) and vice versa. As informed film buffs, we call it “body swap”, a genre in itself whose only ref. French would be the Didier by Alain Chabat. In the US, this exchange of bodies is readily conducive to pochades (In the shoes of a blonde…) or action thrillers (Flip/Face…) Arthur Harari, for his part, draws a melancholic drama of immense ambition – and carried by two astonishing actors – on otherness and the anguish of being alive. But beyond the confusion caused by this double – or even triple – play around appearances, the shadowy staging sinks into a thick labyrinthine mystery which gradually ends up exhausting all its sensitive potential.

Thomas Baura

Read the full review

DECORADO ★★★☆☆

By Alberto Vazquez

Arnold is an unemployed mouse, married half-heartedly, and convinced that his world is just a decoration. He’s not wrong. His city belongs to ALMA, a megacorporation which administers the work, the affects and even the beliefs of its inhabitants. Medical diagnosis: derealization. Prescription: smile and shut up. Four years later Unicorn WarsAlberto Vázquez stretches a 2016 short film over 95 minutes without giving up any of its ferocity. The Galician always hides his firebrands under deceptively cute animal fables, and the artistic direction of José Luis Ágreda does the rest: pop colors, licked flat areas, spacey emptiness behind the facade. Somewhere between a Truman Show passed by Buñuelian vitriol and Orwell reread by the Fleischer brothers, the result is as funny as it is disturbing and the visual orgy takes everything away. Awarded at Annecy, the film also confirms that, after the boom in TV series, Spain is perhaps experiencing its Animation Movida.

Gaël Golhen

DEFROST ★★★☆☆

By Manuela Martelli

Four years after it was noticed Chile 1976Manuela Martelli continues to explore her country’s past with her second feature, discovered at Un Certain Regard in Cannes. This time, she situates her action in 1992, two years after the fall of Pinochet, whose effects of dictatorship are still felt in the buried secrets and unsaid secrets that poison the daily lives of so many families. That is exactly everything that underlies the spine of his story: the sudden disappearance of a young German sportswoman in a ski resort, of which a 9-year-old child, granddaughter of the owners of the hotel where she was staying, will seek to unravel the mystery. This chronicle of a country which dreams of having definitively turned the page on dictatorship will gradually turn into a paranoid thriller at the height of this child confronted with the lies – direct or by omission – of adults. A kid who opens her eyes when almost everyone else prefers to close them to finally move on to something else. A work as fine as it is profound.

Thierry Cheze

MEMORY OF PRINCESS MUMBI ★★★☆☆

By Damien Hauser

Mockumentary, thwarted romance, sci-fi film, story within the story, reflection on the use of artificial intelligence and on cinema itself… Memory of Princess Mumbi is a world-work that entangles several layers with incredible ease. Let’s try a quick summary, even if the matter is much more complex than that: in 2094, in an Africa of the future where high technology has been banned, an aspiring filmmaker tries to shoot a documentary on the great war which took place around twenty years previously. Damien Hauser – both screenwriter, director and editor -, 24 years old at the time of filming, imposes a constantly surprising and stimulating visual grammar (a dance scene which suddenly resembles a music video; the use of AI claimed but not necessarily applied to the places indicated by the film…) which reinvigorates the Afro-futurist aesthetic. But beneath its abundant exterior – sometimes messy, too – this fable is above all a disguised mourning, dedicated to the filmmaker’s little brother. Dizzy.

François Leger

Find these films near you thanks to Première Go

FIRST TO MODERATELY LIKED

TAD THE EXPLORER AND THE MAGIC LAMP ★★☆☆☆

By Enrique Gato

And four for the adventures of Tad the explorer, an absent-minded worker who, following a combination of circumstances, found himself realizing his dream of becoming an archaeologist by embarking on an Indiana Jones-style adventure in In search of the lost city in 2012. After The Secret of King Midas in 2017 and The Emerald Table in 2022, this new part takes him with his partner Sara, their two-year-old granddaughter in search of Mummy who, jealous of now being pushed into the background, has undertaken a journey back in time to the time of her youth when everyone adored her, thanks to Lampe Merveilleuse from the Thousand and One Nights. We find there what has made this Spanish franchise so special since its beginnings: the inventiveness of its scenario, its ability to speak to several generations, its sense of rhythm. It’s a shame that episode after episode, the animation still lacks depth and originality.

Thierry Cheze

FACING THE SEA ★★☆☆☆

By Helen Walsh

A wife he no longer looks at, an ungrateful son, a backbreaking job: it’s been a long time since Jack, a mussel collector in a small village in North Wales, no longer exudes the joy of living. Only his meeting with a sailor younger than him, Daniel, restores color to his melancholy face. The two men observe each other, eye each other, circle around each other like two predators of the same species. Then nothing more. Between the two actors, the desire is barely palpable, the connection feverish, the alchemy non-existent. It’s difficult to build a romantic drama around a relationship that’s hanging by a thread. The emotion immediately falls flat, including when director Helen Walsh decides to use the illness as a dramatic spring and dives headfirst into the melodrama. Anecdotal and lazy, Facing the sea will leave no wake behind him.

Lucie Chiquer

And also

Bombonera, by Syrine Boulanouar

Gods of Mexico, by Helmut Dosantos

New group, by Takashi Shimizu

The covers

Djib by Jean Odoutan

The President’s Men by Alan J. Pakula

Robocop by Paul Verhoeven